László Győri at Eurozine:

Film and theatre are not the only cultural sectors to have come into Fidesz’s crosshairs – the offensive was indeed ‘total’. For example, shortly after Orbán assumed power, the National Cultural Fund was restructured. Originally an independent body, it was responsible for distributing subsidies across all cultural sectors. A great advantage of the cultural fund was that it was independent of government. But Orbán subordinated it to a minister and a secretary of state, who henceforth had the power to revise the decisions of the committees responsible for the various cultural sectors. In summer 2010, members of the Cultural Fund’s councils responsible for publishing were replaced with Fidesz sympathizers. The procedure appeared paradoxical. The state created a fund which was charged not only with distributing money, but also with ensuring that decisions be made by qualified representatives. However, the government then intervened to ensure that these qualified, elected experts could not make democratic decisions about the money.

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JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton, and Michael Morisy at Literary Hub:

The Bureau had received credible evidence regarding Sontag’s trip to Hanoi—a feature in Esquire describing her experiences talking to leading figures of the North Vietnamese government, including Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, that would later be adapted into the book Trip to Hanoi.

Though the New York office did produce a comprehensive report on the origins of the article and all of Sontag’s previous antiwar activity (citing a total of nine informants, whose names remain redacted) within the two week deadline, the investigation into Sontag stretched on for another two years. A 1971 memo from the Department of State confirmed that Sontag hadn’t sought or received permission for her travel to North Vietnam, and another memo from what appears to be French intelligence was passed on from the CIA.

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Rozalind Dineen at the TLS:

It would be uncool, priggish, unthinking to care too much about the artist’s intoxication. Torments require relief and expression: numbing and utterance; alcohol and art. You can’t unpick the work from the circumstances of its creation, nor should you want to. In 1975, the critic Lewis Hyde tried caring about Berryman. A few years after the poet’s death, Hyde published an essay, an angry blast against the romanticization of the inebriated artist. When Hyde read The Dream Songs he didn’t hear the genius so much as “the booze talking”. “Its tone is a moan that doesn’t revolve.” Hyde seemed to believe – unfashionably – that Berryman’s work would have been better had he been sober.

In The Recovering, Leslie Jamison returns to this myth of whiskey and ink, as a writer, an academic and an alcoholic. When, a few years sober herself, Jamison read Hyde on Berryman, she “whispered a secret ‘Amen’”. She wanted “to believe that giving up booze didn’t mean giving up electricity, and Hyde was suggesting that the fruits of alcoholic composition weren’t glorious but deeply compromised”.

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Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times:

Merve Emre’s new book begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalizing suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store. Early in “The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing,” she recalls the “low-level paranoia” she started to feel as she researched her subject: “Files disappear. Tapes are erased. People begin to watch you.” Archival gatekeepers were by turns controlling and evasive, acting like furtive trustees of terrible secrets. What, she wanted to know, were they trying to hide?

It takes a while to realize that Emre has gotten you hooked under arguably false pretenses, but what she finally pulls off is so inventive and beguiling you can hardly begrudge her for it. The revelations she uncovers are less scandalous than they are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre. Emre, a professor of English at Oxford, wrote a previous book on the surge of readers in postwar America, and she knows that a story is inextricable from how it’s told. “The Personality Brokers” is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel — a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type.

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Nir Shafir in Aeon:

As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off.

Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo developed it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.

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Rajan Menon in The Nation:

So effectively has the Beltway establishment captured the concept of national security that, for most of us, it automatically conjures up images of terrorist groups, cyber warriors, or “rogue states.” To ward off such foes, the United States maintains a historically unprecedented constellation of military bases abroad and, since 9/11, has waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere that have gobbled up nearly $4.8 trillion. The 2018 Pentagon budget already totals $647 billion—four times what China, second in global military spending, shells out and more than the next 12 countriescombined, seven of them American allies. For good measure, Donald Trump has added an additional $200 billion to projected defense expenditures through 2019.

Yet to hear the hawks tell it, the United States has never been less secure. So much for bang for the buck.

For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn’t terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It’s internal—and economic.

More here.

Tim Martin in New Statesman:

Seventy-five years ago, in April 1943, the research chemist Albert Hofmann did something distinctly out of scientific character. Impelled by what he later called a “peculiar presentiment”, he resolved to take a second look at the 25th in a series of molecules derived from the ergot fungus, a drug he had discovered some years earlier and dismissed as of no scientific interest. As he synthesised it for the second time, it made contact with his skin, giving rise to an unprecedented experience: a “stream of fantastic pictures [and] extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours”. Five days later, on 19 April, he decided to test the chemical on himself under controlled conditions, thus becoming the first person in history knowingly to embark on an acid trip.

Intermittently ever since, psychonauts and countercultural enthusiasts have celebrated 19 April as “Bicycle Day”, in recognition of this Ground Zero of Western psychedelia. After cautiously ingesting a dose of LSD-25, Hofmann enlisted the help of a lab assistant and wobbled home on his bicycle, while his vision “wavered and distorted as though in a curved mirror”. Sprawled on the sofa, he underwent a “severe crisis” that, viewed through the telescope of 75 years of psychedelic experience, looks endearingly familiar: one in which demonic terrors, mystical encounters and loss of ego alternated with fantastic imagery, synaesthetic perception and a desire to drink “more than two litres” of the milk provided by a neighbour. This year, however, those celebrating Bicycle Day did so against a new background. After decades in the shadow of the 1960s counterculture, psychedelic drugs have emerged once again into the light of scientific orthodoxy. Researchers at major universities – Johns Hopkins in the US, Imperial College in London – have, over the past 20 years, been conducting experiments at growing scale to assess the effects of substances such as LSD, MDMA and psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. Their results suggest that these powerful molecules, long stigmatised as drugs of self-gratification or abuse, may instead be miracle treatments for the most intractable disorders of our time: depression, isolation, addiction and post-traumatic stress.

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Lewis H. Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Helena Rosenblatt in the Boston Review:

Recent primaries have given Democrats reasons for hope, but they have also exposed fault lines within the party. Divisions are visible in the very labels used to describe them. Many use the word “liberal” as a catchall to describe left-of-center politics in general, but self-described leftists and members of the Democratic Socialists of America often characterize liberals and Democrats as their opponents—viewing them as the compromising centrists standing in the way of a more progressive or socialist agenda.

The language is telling. Some are “liberal Democrats,” others “establishment liberals.” Then there are “leftist” liberals and “progressive” ones. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ousted incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s fourteenth congressional district, calls herself a “democratic socialist,” but she favors “progressive” policies. Andrew Gillum, by contrast, winner of the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida, favors a “progressive” platform, but categorically denies being a “socialist.” And Ayanna Pressley’s win in the seventh congressional district in Massachusetts has been described as the victory of an “unapologetic liberal” against the more “quiet” Michael Capuano—who is, nevertheless, “more liberal than Nancy Pelosi.”

Is this semantic murkiness a problem? Historian Sean Wilentz thinks it is, arguing recently in Democracy Journal that the confusion of terms reflects the “momentous muddle” in which Democrats find themselves.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Psychologists are in the midst of an ongoing, difficult reckoning. Many believe that their field is experiencing a “reproducibility crisis,” because they’ve tried and failed to repeat experiments done by their peers. Even classic results—the stuff of textbooks and TED talks—have proven surprisingly hard to replicate, perhaps because they’re the results of poor methods and statistical tomfoolery. These problems have spawned a community of researchers dedicated to improving the practices of their field and forging a more reliable way of doing science.

These attempts at reform have met resistance. Critics have argued that the so-called crisis is nothing of the sort, and that researchers who have failed to repeat past experiments were variously incompetent, prejudiced, or acting in bad faith.

But if those critiques are correct, then why is it that scientists seem to be remarkably good at predicting which studies in psychology and other social sciences will replicate, and which will not?

Consider the new results from the Social Sciences Replication Project, in which 24 researchers attempted to replicate social-science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science—the world’s top two scientific journals.

More here.

David Streitfeld in the New York Times:

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.

“Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable.

At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” said Lina Khan.

It’s nothing, really. A few books are piled up haphazardly next to a bottle with water and another with tea. Ms. Khan was in Dallas quite a bit over the last year, refining an argument about monopoly power that takes aim at one of the most admired, secretive and feared companies of our era: Amazon.

More here.

Albert Mobilio at Bookforum:

In 1969 the painter Jack Whitten arrived in the town of Agia Galini, on the Greek island of Crete. Shortly before leaving New York he’d had a dream in which he was commanded to find a tree and carve it. From the bus window he spied the tree from his dream. He approached the owner, but because Whitten couldn’t speak Greek, the man thought he was saying he wanted to cut it down. Whitten came up with a plan to communicate his aim: “I went into the surrounding hills, found some wood and set up shop on the harbor beneath some trees.” The owner understood immediately and even lent Whitten his tools. The totem he carved still stands in the town—a fisherman looks to the sea, an octopus winds around the trunk, and at the very top “is a large fish with its tail pointing to the sky.” This account, published in Notes from the Woodshed, a volume of the artist’s reflections on his art and practice, provides a key to understanding the gestural, communicative power of Whitten’s sculpture. Just as he was able to impart meaning by doing rather than speaking that first day on Crete, his sculptures—currently exhibited for the first time in a show that has arrived at the Met Breuer (New York)—express their strong emotional and spiritual content by foregrounding the physical acts of their creation. Carved, chiseled, polished, and hammered into insinuating, assertive shapes, these pieces make viewers feel the actual work, and sense the very grip of the artist’s hand on the hammer as it finds the chisel’s head.

more here.

Chris Kraus interviews Olivia Laing at The Paris Review:

Yes, it was incredibly liberating, both to invent the character and to help myself to the ravishing grab-bag of Acker’s own work. Crudo is probably the only book I’ve really enjoyed writing, because it was so fast and so free. It was such a relief to ditch the I, but to keep all the real details of the world, to collage it together rather than inventing it afresh. I definitely have a horror of making shit up, but I also have a horror of confessional writing. It’s like the case studies in I Love Dick, I do want to write about the personal (mine, Acker’s, David Wojnarowicz’s and so on), but for political reasons.

What do you think of autofiction as a term? It makes me feel a bit sick, but I don’t quite know why. I think it’s the idea that it’s some vogueish new style, rather than something writers have always done. Is Proust writing autofiction? Is Virginia Woolf? What do you think about it, and roman-a-clef? Is that what you see yourself as doing? And why anyway do people feel such an urge to pin things down in terms of genre?

more here.

Matthew Desmond at the New York Times:

Democrats may scoff at Republicans’ work requirements, but they have yet to challenge the dominant conception of poverty that feeds such meanspirited politics. Instead of offering a counternarrative to America’s moral trope of deservedness, liberals have generally submitted to it, perhaps even embraced it, figuring that the public will not support aid that doesn’t demand that the poor subject themselves to the low-paying jobs now available to them. Even stalwarts of the progressive movement seem to reserve economic prosperity for the full-time worker. Senator Bernie Sanders once declared, echoing a long line of Democrats who have come before and after him, “Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.” Sure, but what about those who work 20 or 30 hours, like Vanessa?

Because liberals have allowed conservatives to set the terms of the poverty debate, they find themselves arguing about radical solutions that imagine either a fully employed nation (like a jobs guarantee) or a postwork society (like a universal basic income).

more here.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing
flowers home.
…………… –Wisława Szymborska

Why I Don’t Mention Flowers When Conversations
with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences

In the Kashmir mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,
dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man
who has traversed such a world,
whose hands and eyes have
betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men
wrapped a woman in a sheet.
She didn’t struggle.
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road
and stoned her.

The first man was her father.
He threw two stones in a row.
Her brother had filled his pockets
with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive
of disturbed bees. The volley
of stones against her body
drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet
like a patch of violets,
a hundred roses in bloom.

by Natalie Diaz
From When My Brother Was an Aztec
Copper Canyon Press, 2012

Tim Cross in More Intelligent Life:

For those who believe in the distinction between high art and low, video games have long been near the bottom of the pile. Fortunately, that has not stopped some of the world’s great art museums from putting on exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, began acquiring games in 2012 and a year later invited visitors to play some of them in a show called “Applied Design”. The most recent video-games exhibition, “Videogames Design/Play/Disrupt”, takes place at an even grander instituion – the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The arriviste status of video games means that exhibitions about them – and especially those that take place in marbled bastions of established culture – risk coming across as cringing and defensive. The V&A, to its credit, mostly manages to avoid that trap. Instead it unapologetically addresses video games on their own terms, as a medium that, more than any other, combines art and storytelling with engineering and technology. The show kicks off with a quote from Frank Lantz, an academic and developer, that neatly summarises the blend of skills required. “Making games combines everything that’s hard about building a bridge with everything that’s hard about composing an opera. Games are operas made out of bridges.”

Parts of the process look like storyboarding for a film. The concept art and character sketches for the protagonists of “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic survival game, show the attention to detail present in the designers’ creation of Ellie, the teenage girl that is the focus of the story. Other parts have no real parallel with other forms of art. Books and films, for instance, railroad readers and viewers along the plotlines invented by their authors. Games are different. Even those that focus on narrative rather than gameplay must give players enough choice and freedom to maintain the illusion that they are influencing a coherent, believable world – but not so much that anarchy reigns and storytelling becomes impossible. “Journey”, which puts players in the shoes of a pilgrim travelling towards a mysterious mountain, nudges its players towards interesting encounters with subtle tricks of light and shadow.

More here.

Sarah Zhang in Nautilus:

From bulging biceps to 7-foot wingspans to a striking paucity of fat, elite athletes’ bodies often look quite different from those of the rest of us. But it’s not only athletes’ bodies that are different; their brains are just as finely tuned to the mental demands of a particular sport. Here are seven areas of the brain that enable seven different athletes to pull off extraordinary feats.

Winning a Battle of Wills

When the 1988 World Series started, Kirk Gibson, the best hitter on the underdog Los Angeles Dodgers, had injured both legs. He wasn’t even supposed to play. But at a key moment in Game 1, he was nevertheless called to pinch hit. He promptly took on one of a baseball player’s most challenging jobs: getting inside the head of the opposing pitcher. It was the bottom of the ninth, and the Dodgers were down by one, with a runner on base and two outs. Dennis Eckersley, one of the greatest closers in baseball history, was pitching. The count on Gibson went to three balls and two strikes. Douglas recalled a bit of advice from Mel Didier, a Dodgers scout. “Now remember, and don’t ever forget this, if you’re up in the ninth inning and we’re down or it’s tied and you get to 3-and-2 against Eckersley,” said Didier retelling the conversation later in ESPN, “Partner, sure as I’m standing here breathing, you’re going to see a 3-2 backdoor slider.” Sure enough, a slider came breaking toward Gibson. He swung awkwardly, unable to use his legs, but he had the advantage of knowing exactly what pitch was coming. The ball sailed into the stands in right field. The Dodgers won the game and, eventually, the series.

More here.